Categories
Historic Sites

Bringing the World to Philadelphia


 
During its last decades, the Commercial Museum was a forlorn and forgotten anachronism – little more than a hazy memory for aging Philadelphians of a long-ago junior high school field trip. When it was demolished in 2005, few mourned its passing. But during its first decades, there was probably no Philadelphia institution more dynamic, useful or better-known around the globe. It was much more than a mere museum. It was the de facto U.S. Department of Commerce, before the federal government established that department.

The idea for the museum was born with a visit by University of Pennsylvania biology professor Dr. William P. Wilson to the great Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago. He convinced City Council and Mayor Edwin S. Stuart to purchase 24 railcars filled with materials from the fair when it closed. Wilson became director of the museum and added tons of new material from big fairs and exhibits around the world.

Six years after its founding in 1894, the museum consisted of five buildings along 34th Street near Spruce. Its large staff promoted world trade in a dozen ways including the collection of countless items of trade goods from every nation in the world. Collecting tons of foreign goods and raw materials was aimed at showing American businesses what other nations offered in the way of trade goods and what they might want to buy. The museum even compiled lists on which foreign firms to avoid.

The museum also spewed out an ocean of publications, reports and statistical data and did translations in two-dozen languages. It put together international buyers and sellers, boasted up-to-date scientific testing labs, and had a network of 20,000 overseas correspondents feeding statistics and facts on trade back to Philadelphia headquarters. It had a huge library of books and publications relating to world trade. Along with lectures for adults, it provided classes on trade and geography for school students and gave them a glimpse of exotic lands.

It was such a unique and useful concept that President William McKinley came to Philadelphia to speak at its birth – an address covered by the New York Times. The President also sent a message in 1899 for the dedication of the museum’s buildings and to welcome a Commercial Congress attended by trade officials from 60 nations.


 

While the City had provided the initial cash to launch the museum and start its collecting activities, the exposition and trade congress were authorized by both houses of Congress. The federal treasury gave $350,000, and money from Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia and private capital brought the total to $800,000. A major source of continued funding for the museum was membership fees of about $100 a year from businesses with an interest in export/import. Seventy percent of the member businesses were from outside the Philadelphia region.

When the U.S. Department of Commerce was born in 1914, the museum began to lose its unique position in the country. In 1930, the Philadelphia Convention Hall opened in the middle of the museum buildings. Buildings south of Convention Hall were replaced with modern exhibit space in the 1960s. Eventually, the complex became known as the Civic Center on Civic Center Boulevard although the ornate northern-most building retained its role as the Commercial Museum It enjoyed some brief glory in the early 1960s with gala trade fairs and fashion shows focused on Italy and France.

The complex became derelict in the late 1990s after the opening of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Center City. The University of Pennsylvania eventually purchased the complex to expand its medical research facilities. Although truckloads of museum material had been discarded over the decades, there were still about 27,000 items in storage including some rare and expensive craft and folk items from Africa and Asia. Curators at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and other museums were delighted to share the hidden treasures.

References:

  • Hunter, Ruth. The Trade and Convention Center of Philadelphia: Its Birth and Renascence. City of Philadelphia, 1962.

  • Philadelphia Daily News. “A Museum is Set to Pack It In,” June 13, 1994.

  • Philadelphia Daily News “Museum Exhibits Parceled Out,” June 19, 2001.

Categories
Urban Planning

The Olmsted Brothers’ Artificial Nature: South Philadelphia’s League Island (F.D.R) Park


 
When author Christopher Morley sauntered around “the Neck” one hot summer evening in the early 20th century, to his surprise he found Philadelphians living an almost rural existence amid the marshes, ash heaps and junk yards. But Morley saw that the boggy land where the Delaware met the Schuylkill – “the canal country of South Philadelphia” – held great promise. He longed to see the “wonderful Dutch meadows of the Neck reclaimed into one of the world’s loveliest riverside parks.”

Perhaps Morley knew of the city’s plan for a South Philadelphia park -perhaps he did not- but as early as 1899 the New York Times was announcing with subtle hauteur that “the winning plan for the new League Island Park at Philadelphia was drawn by a New Yorker, Samuel Parsons Jr.” But to the Times, the conditions of the site looked bleak: “the territory where it is proposed to lay out this park consists of 300 acres of low-lying land on the Delaware River…. Irrigation ditches, a sluggish, winding stream, and a small amount of what may be termed upland are all that at present represent the park.”


 

Though city planners placed Parsons’s design on its 1904 Plan of Park and Parkway Improvements in South Philadelphia and began laying out his design, by 1910 work had ground to a halt. Then in 1912, the city’s director of public works, Morris Cooke, asked the preeminent landscape architecture firm, Olmsted Brothers, to produce designs for League Island Park, Oregon (Marconi) Plaza and the stretch of Broad Street connecting the two parks known as the Southern Boulevard. The Olmsted firm, helmed by the son and stepson of noted landscape architecture pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted, produced two plans that worked with the low lying tidal conditions of League Island’s site. An earlier Olmsted plan borrowed Parson’s design feature of a large plaza in the center of the park along Broad Street. Later plans omitted this formal plaza. But all three designs were not short on water.

The final Olmsted plan situated Meadow Lake and Edgewood Lake inside a ring of carefully segregated lawns, meadows, and “playsteads”. While the area east of Broad Street was designed for active recreation, the western portion was to be a “landscape park.” Incorporating the design features developed by their father, the Olmsted Brothers ran curvilinear paths throughout the complex of open space and water. Just like their father’s Central and Prospect Parks in New York, a combination of altered topography and tree screens effectively walled off the city. The Olmsteds also sought to remake portions of Parson’s design: they adjusted the drives, simplified the drainage system, and made features of the park more “natural”. Thus, lawns and marsh plantings near the lakes replaced severe concrete retaining walls. (Note: some of the photos included in this essay show the retaining wall prior to demolition.) The whole effect was to create a series of well-structured, picturesque natural views and to segregate recreation spaces according to their function.


 

Beneath the surface, a sophisticated drainage system connected the lakes to the alluvial waters of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. This connection allowed them to “breathe” or expand and contract depending on the tides. Portions of Hollander Creek, the “sluggish, winding stream,” was banished to a viaduct and connected to the rivers.

Although the Olmsteds considered their design inalterable, League Island Park underwent substantial modifications almost as soon as it was completed in 1921. New structures were added for the Sesqui-Centennial of 1926 and the original boathouse on Edgewood Lake was converted into a Russian Tea House. The John Morton Memorial Building, now known as the American Swedish Historical Museum was added north of Edgewood Lake in 1926. Other portions of the Olmsted design have been irrevocably obliterated. The decision to construct a municipal stadium on the recreation space land to the east of Broad Street ensured that this part of the park would forever be a stadium complex. A golf course, added in 1940 in response to changing recreational tastes, removed the western portion of the Park. By the late 1940s, even the Park’s name had changed to honor America’s Depression-era and wartime leader. And although the encroachment of I-95 appears the most grievous assault on the park; its looming presence has given an unmistakable ambiance to Philadelphia’s world-class FDR skate park.


 

While recreational tastes may change, officials at the Fairmount Park Commission have seen the practical wisdom and natural simplicity of the Olmsteds’ plan. When tidal waters began to seep up through the bottom of FDR’s large concrete pool made from Meadow Lake, park landscape architects converted the pool into a natural marshland.

References:

  • Morley, Christopher. Travels in Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1920), 65.

  • Heilprin, Angelo. Town Geology: The Lesson of the Philadelphia Rocks, (Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Sciences, 1885), 125.

  • “Proposed League Island Park at Philadelphia,” The New York Times, 2 April 1899.

  • “League Island Park (F.D.R. Park) Historic District Building Inventory” (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Historical Commission, 2001), 1-6.

  • Fairmount Park Commission Archives.

Categories
Urban Planning

The Schuylkill Expressway: Modern Highway or "Worst Mistake"?


Though he later regretted his steadfast support for the intrusive road, mayor Richardson Dilworth saw the construction of the Schuylkill Expressway as a necessary component of the region’s postwar transportation overhaul. To Dilworth and other transit planners, the specter of gridlocked colonial streets loomed large. As early as 1931, a regional planner had derided Philadelphia’s lack of interest in the public infrastructure, calling the city a “growing child in late adolescence,” or “an ailing adult . . . rotting at the core.” With the Depression and World War II intervening, Philadelphia’s situation was dire. In 1955, the Urban Transportation and Traffic Board, an organ created by mayor Joseph Clark to better coordinate transit infrastructure, advised the creation of an 11-county transportation authority with wide control over mass transit, parking, traffic control, buses, and transportation in the air and on water. And pro-growth citizen groups like the Greater Philadelphia Movement and the Philadelphia Citizens’ Council on City Planning joined the official planners in support of a regional network of modern multi-lane limited access freeways. For the businessmen who comprised these organizations, an integrated transit and highway system would assure that center city would remain the healthy cultural and commercial core of the region. Richardson Dilworth understood what was at stake. In an editorial in the New York Herald Tribune, Dilworth portrayed the economic health of a central business district as a general barometer of regional health. “This center city,” he wrote in 1958, “must serve as an effective capital to its area by providing the headquarters for industry, business, banking, hotels, merchandising, medicine, entertainment and culture.”


As early as the 1930s, planners had dreamed of a woodsy, genteel parkway through the Schuylkill River Valley that would connect the then-state park at Valley Forge with Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. The parkway, limited only to automobiles, would offer an aesthetically-controlled and measured movement through the natural landscape. Yet this vision of a sedate, visually appealing drive fell to the exigencies of regional planning and traffic engineering. By 1947-48, the design favored by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission sought to interface with the state’s extension of the Turnpike at King of Prussia. To the delight of civic boosters, the City Planning Commission reported in 1950 that the state had “recognized that inter-regional highways connecting industrial and consumer centers can be fully effective in building up the economic vitality of the state.” Far from a leisurely parkway, the city’s new highways were designed to be people movers and catalysts for growth.


Although highway construction enjoyed popular support in the postwar years, topographic conditions, funding problems, and public resistance combined to make the Schuylkill Expressway one of the nation’s most idiosyncratic highways. Engineers cast the concrete ribbon through a landscape beset by natural and man-made obstacles, designing solutions that were unthinkable after standards set by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. Engineer Bill Allen’s narrow stretch under 30th Street Station, the left-hand South Street Exit, and scant acceleration lanes are engineering curiosities which tell of the difficulty of building an urban highway on marginal space. The monumental traffic jams that formed at City Line Avenue when the first stretch of road was completed in 1949 foretold an ominous future. Clearly, the road was so attractive that “expressway” was a misnomer.


By the time the last stretch opened in 1959, Dilworth could boast of a new urban highway, the Roosevelt Expressway, and an embryonic mass transportation authority. But he could not forgive the road’s blunt incursion into Fairmount Park. Truly, Fairmount Park had been irreparably changed. Gustine Lake, a large public swimming hole in East Park near Ridge Avenue and City Line Avenue Bridge had been filled in for the aptly named “Gustine Lake Interchange.” Greenland Mansion in Fairmount Park stood right in the path of the Expressway – it would have sat right where the Greenland Road bridge now stands. Much sculpture was displaced and the large impervious surfaces of the road now affect the park’s watersheds. And the ever present drone of traffic interrupts the stillness. Allowing the road to bisect West Park was “the worst mistake in my Administration,” Dilworth later lamented.

References:

  • Bauman, John F., “Expressways, Public Housing and Renewal: A Blueprint for Postwar Philadelphia, 1945-1960,” Pennsylvania History, Volume 57, Number 1, January 1990.
  • Clark Jr., Joseph S. and Dennis J. Clark, “Rally and Relapse, 1946-1968,” Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. Russell F. Weigley, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 695-698.
  • Conn, Steven. Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 176-178.
  • http://www.phillyroads.com/roads/schuylkill/ (Accessed October 17, 2007).

Categories
Historic Sites

Aquatic Freeway

During the heady years of the late 19th century, the Schuylkill and the Delaware Rivers were as congested as the interstates that flank them today. Oil tankers, freighters, coal barges, and an occasional ocean liner clogged the Delaware River during the daylight hours. The Schuylkill River, although narrower and Inflatable Dome Tent shallower, was overrun with smaller vessels, such as the wooden sailing schooners showing in the above photographs. And as on the Schuylkill Expressway, accidents happened!

According to the photograph caption, the two ships collided during the “freshet” of May 1894. A freshet is a sudden spring thaw leading to flash floods. The freshet of 1894 killed 12 people throughout the state and, according to the New York Times, caused $3 million in damage in Williamsport alone, washing away buildings, bridges and railroads.1 These wrecked schooners, jammed against the South Street Bridge on the Schuylkill River, represented a small fraction of the damage.

During the Early Republic (1790 to 1850), the banks of the two rivers bristled with the masts and yards of sailing ships of all kinds: clippers heading to the Far East, navy frigates sailing up the River to the Federal Street Navy Yard for repairs, packets bound for England, and schooners headed for the fishing grounds of the Grand Banks and the Chesapeake Bay.

The sea-going paddlewheel steamer appeared in the 1830s. Although these new ships were no longer bound by the whims of tide and trade winds, they still carried full sets of sails in case of mechanical breakdown. Sailors and naval architects are generally a conservative set. The 10,000 ton luxury liners City of New York and City of Paris, built in 1889 for the Inman Line, had three masts that could be fully rigged for sails. Since they had two sets of propellers capable of moving the ship at over 20 knots, the sails were included more out of habit than out of necessity.2

The sailing ships involved in the collision were schooners. Schooners were the workhorses of the East Coast and the Great Lakes. They were used as “pleasure craft, cargo carriers, privateers, slavers, fishing boats and pilot boats.”3 Schooners were relatively small vessels – seldom longer than 125 feet – and usually had two masts. They were rigged with triangular rather than square sails. The tops of these sails were supported at the top of the masts by yards known as gaffs. Big triangular sails allowed schooners to sail close to the wind, and they required a relatively small crew to sail. Two schooners survive to this day at New York’s South Street Seaport. The first is the iron-hulled Pioneer, built in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania to haul sand up and down the Delaware River. 4 The second is the Lettie G. Howard, built in 1893 in Essex, Massachusetts as a fishing schooner.5

The rich cousins of the humble schooners were the great square riggers, boasting masts twelve stories high and up to three hundred feet long. In their day, they were the queens of the high seas, ferrying cargo and passengers across the oceans. Square riggers required large crews to hoist and trim sails, and best sailed when perpendicular to the wind. One of the few surviving tall ships is the Mosholu, constructed in the late 19th century, and is built of steel rather than wood.

Despite the ascendancy of the steam engine in the mid-19th century, sailing ships continued to play the Delaware River and eastern seaboard up until the 1910s. Schooners in particular were cheap to operate, and could easily haul cargo such as lumber, grain, and manufactured from a large port such as Philadelphia to smaller communities that lacked modern docking facilities. Or vise versa. By 1900, many sailing ships had auxiliary engines for river navigation, but they were still ungainly and hard-to-steer. Captains used to heeling hard-to-the-wind under sail now found themselves threading between bridge piers and dodging other ships the constricted shipping channels. In addition to navigating a constantly-shifting obstacle course, captains also had to fight treacherous currents and currents that swirled the muddy rivers.

After World War I, sailing ships quickly faded from the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, replaced by efficient but ugly barges and coastal steamers. Most ended their days in scrap yards. A few have survived to this day. They serve as static attractions like the Mosholu, cadet training ships such as the Coast Guard’s Eagle, and floating ambassadors of goodwill such as Philadelphia’s barkentine Gazela. One tall ship, the Sea Cloud, now serves as a luxurious small cruise ship.

 

References:

1 The New York Times, “Flood Swept Away Millions” May 23rd, 1894 http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=2&res= 9F01E6D71F39E033A25750C2A9639C94659ED7CF&oref=slogin&oref=slogin (Accessed October 8, 2007.).

2SS City of Paris, 1889, Glasgow City Archives. http://www.theclydebankstory.com/image.php?inum=TCSM00150 (Accessed October 4, 2007.).

3Schoonerman.com http://www.schoonerman.com/home.htm (Accessed October 4, 2007).

4South Street Seaport Museum, Pioneer. http://www.southstseaport.org/index1.aspx?BD=8997 (Accessed October 4, 2007).

5South Street Seaport Museum, Pioneer. http://www.southstseaport.org/index1.aspx?BD=8999 (Accessed October 4, 2007).

Categories
Historic Sites

The Department of Docks, Wharfs and Ferries: Making Philadelphia’s Modern Waterfront


 
Arguably Philadelphia’s most progressive mayor of the early 20th century, Rudolph Blankenburg (1912-1916) the “Old Dutch Cleanser” – sought to reform and modernize many of the city’s graft-ridden and inefficient departments. Blankenburg, realizing that Philadelphia was locked in competition with New York, Boston and Baltimore for international maritime trade, spurred the recently created Department of Docks, Wharves, and Ferries to better coordinate the city’s port facilities. As one port official put it in 1912, “New York is one of the best ports to enter, but one of the most expensive to get through.” If Philadelphia was to compete with a more advantageously situated New York, its port infrastructure had to allow quicker and easier movement of ships and cargo.


 
At the head of the Department, Blankenburg placed George W. Norris – a talented banker and lawyer who worked closely with the energetic reformer and technocrat Morris Cooke, the director of public works. In a move that pleased both the public and the city’s shipping and transportation interests, Cooke and Norris secured an agreement barring grade railroad crossings in South Philadelphia in 1913. From his office at the Bourse, Norris’ oversaw the collection of rents from pier tenants, regulated construction of piers and the movement of ships, and planned large-scale expansions to the city’s port. Norris’ most ambitious project, the creation of the Moyamensing and Southwark piers, would greatly expand the city’s ability to receive ships and their cargo. The “finger piers” were to extend down the Delaware waterfront to the Navy Yard like cilia, making Philadelphia the undisputed “Port of Pennsylvania.” Though the “Port of Pennsylvania” scheme was never fully realized, Philadelphia had four times the amount of municipal docks when Norris left office. The prolific engineer George S. Webster succeeded Norris as director of the Department and continued to build modern piers along the north Delaware waterfront.


 
The municipal piers constructed by the Department in the late 1910s-20s were sophisticated industrial machines designed to speed the movement of cargo from one mode of transportation to another. Railroad tracks ran laterally through the long buildings which also served as warehouses. Cranes and flat loading bays allowed easy movement of cargo onto waiting boxcars and all piers were connected to the Philadelphia Belt Line Railroad which ran down Delaware Ave. The piers’ reinforced concrete neoclassical facades suggested monumentality and authority while seeking to soften the gruffness of the rough commercial waterfront. The Department also built recreation piers such as municipal pier No. 57 at Penn Treaty Park in 1919.

Though finger piers became obsolete after World War II with the advent of larger ships and containerization, the presence of several municipal piers along the Delaware reminds us of the ambition and foresight of the Department of Wharves, Docks and Ferries in the early 20th century.

References:

  • Lloyd M. Abernathy “Progressivism, 1905-1919,” Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, Russell F. Weigley, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 546-554.

  • Frank H. Taylor and Wilfred H. Schoff, The Port and City of Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: International Congress of Navigation, 1912) http://books.google.com/books?id=BR291mAr4ooC&pg=PA44#PPA1,M2 Accessed 7 September 2007.

  • Donald W. Disbrow “Reform in Philadelphia Under Mayor Blankenburg, 1912-1916,” Pennsylvania History 27 (October 1960), 379-396.

Categories
Neighborhoods

Rittenhouse Square


 
Originally named Southwest Square and later renamed after David Rittenhouse, a famous Philadelphian astronomer, Rittenhouse Square is one of five original open-space parks planned by William Penn. Although it is now one of the most fashionable public spaces in Philadelphia, the park was not always a popular gathering place for the city’s residents. In the eighteenth century the park provided pasturage for local livestock and by the late 1700s brickyards surrounded the square. Not until the 1880s, when the city’s elite began to move into the area, did the park begin to take on its modern elegance.

The park’s current beauty is not necessarily a product of city government’s commitment to public gathering places. Since the early nineteenth century local residents have played an important role in the park’s beautification and maintenance. In the decade before the Civil War local residents raised funds to build fountains in the park. Although the fountains created so much mud that the City Council removed them, the lack of foresight did not deter future benefactors from donating money to improve the park. In 1913, the newly formed Rittenhouse Square Improvement Association contracted Paul Philippe Cret to redesign the park. Cret’s design, which connected diagonal walkways beginning at the corners at a central meeting point, reflects the park’s current layout. The Friends of Rittenhouse Square, a nonprofit organization established in 1976, carries on the tradition of community support. The organization finances weekly landscaping in the square, the planting of new trees and shrubs, bench installation, and sidewalk cleaning.

The area around the park is still home to the city’s elite. High-rise condos and five-star hotels replaced mansions in the twentieth century. Despite the area’s high price tag, the square is one of the city’s most democratic public spaces. Rittenhouse Square brings together perhaps the most diverse sampling of Philadelphia’s residents. It also serves as a host to public art. The park boasts several of the city’s most well-known outdoor sculptures. Among them are Antoine-Louis Barye’s Lion Crushing the Serpent, Paul Manship’s Duck Girl, and Albert Laessle’s Billy.

References:

Categories
Entertainment

Soft Pretzels: A Philadelphia "Culinary" Tradition


Just like other major cities and tourist hot spots, Philadelphia has its own unique set of delectable edibles. New York is known for bagels, Chicago for its buttery crusted deep dish pizza, and Savannah for its heavenly pralines. Philadelphia has made its way into similar culinary fame, not only for cheese steaks and water ice (characteristically known as “wudder ice” by the locals), but also for the delicious, chewy, salty, “get-em just about everywhere in Philly,” soft twisted pretzels. Philly’s soft-pretzels are breakfast for many a commuter on the run, dependable snacks for the late-night munchy crowd, and at around fifty cents a pop if you buy them individually, the big salty twists topped with yellow mustard (or not) even stand in as “hearty” lunch or dinner for the hungry college student strapped for cash. Soft pretzels are so desirable in this city that some report Philadelphia consumes up to twelve times the national average in pretzels each year.


So, how exactly did the pretzel come to take its place as one of the city’s top tidbits? According to legend, pretzels got their start as far back as 610 AD when Italian monks used the pretiolas, or “little rewards” to encourage children to be diligent in their prayer studies. While the pretiolas soon became popular in Austria and Germany where they were known as “bretzels,” it was not until some ten-plus centuries later that they made their way to the United States in the hands of those immigrants eventually identified as the Pennsylvania Dutch.

While accounts vary, one source claims the first American pretzel was baked in 1861, about 75 miles west of Philadelphia in Lititz, Pennsylvania. As the story goes, sometime around 1850, bread baker Ambrose Roth obtained the recipe from a hobo as a thank-you for a hot meal and some hospitality. Roth then passed the recipe on to his apprentice, Julius Sturgis who subsequently established the country’s first commercial pretzel bakery. Because of the tight trading ties between Philadelphia and the areas in and around Pennsylvania Dutch Country, it was only natural that pretzels would trickle into the city’s cuisine. Once cart vendors picked up on the potential of the salty treat, pretzels became a run away favorite of Philadelphians who, by the way, prefer them soft, chewy, and often topped off with a simple yellow mustard.


Today, most of Philadelphia’s soft pretzels are made, not in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, but right here in the city. Some of the better-known factories are the Federal Pretzel Baking Company at 638 Federal Street, the Philadelphia Soft Pretzel Factory at various locations around the city, and the Center City Pretzel at 816 Washington Avenue. Vendors sell the popular treat at the local fresh markets, out of plain brown paper bags in the streets during rush hour, and – most visibly – out of the once-shiny metal lunch carts that line the city streets. With pretzel merchants on every corner, one thing is certain: In Philadelphia, you never have to go far for a tasty treat.

References:

Categories
Events and People

Up, Up and Away

Before there were space shuttles or airplanes, men experimented with other options of ascending into the heavens. Some means were less successful than others, contraptions attached to the body imitating the wings of birds being but one example. In the late 18th century, men experimented with another possible method of flight, the hot air balloon. At first the balloons were launched with no passengers, then with various animal riders, and finally carrying men.


 

The first recorded manned flight in a balloon left from Paris on November 21, 1783. This 22 minute flight was piloted by Jean François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis François-Laurent d’Arlandes. Many others pilots followed them into the skies, including Jean Pierre Blanchard who led the first balloon flight in America on January 9, 1793. His ascent is believed to be depicted in the woodcarving shown above.

Blanchard had flown many times before. This particular balloon flight was his 45th ascension. The French aeronaut planned a demonstration of his art in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Jail, located near the site of what is now Independence Square. After marketing the flight ahead of time, Blanchard intended to charge onlookers $5 to see his balloon take off. This price was later lowered to $2 as he discovered fewer people were buying tickets because they reasoned that they could just as easily see the balloon fly from outside the prison walls.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among a number of other notable figures were present for the take off. Washington sent along with Blanchard a note explaining the demonstration and imploring that people aid him whenever and wherever he eventually landed. (When the first unmanned hot air balloon experiment landed in Europe, it is said that farmers attacked the balloon with a pitchfork, not understanding what it was). In addition to the letter, Blanchard also brought along a bottle of wine to present to any unsuspecting landowners he might encounter at the end of his flight. Around 10 am on that day he took off from the grounds of the Walnut Street Jail. While in the air he performed many experiments. In addition to the expected meteorological experiments (recording the pressure, temperature, and other general weather conditions), he also filled several bottles with air to be studied later, took his pulse (which, on average, he found to be higher while he was in the air than when he was on the ground), and weighed a stone. He later landed in Gloucester County, New Jersey.

Blanchard had hoped to make enough money from selling tickets to view the flight to cover his expenses. When he fell rather short of this goal, Blanchard remained in Philadelphia experimenting and inventing other forms of transportation. He remained here until moving on in 1795 when yellow fever epidemics in the city caused people to be cautious about gathering together in groups to witness his experiments.

References:

Categories
Historic Sites

Eastern State Penitentiary

In the early 19th century, a system of punishment was created that could be traced back to the Quakers. Called the Pennsylvania system because it was first used here, this method involved the use of solitary confinement to rehabilitate criminals sent to prison. The underlying belief of the Pennsylvania System was that solitary confinement would give prisoners time to reflect on their lives and change the wrongs within it. In other words, if prisoners were forced to think about their crimes, they would become penitent (this is also the origin of the word “penitentiary”).

By 1821, the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (founded in 1787 by Benjamin Rush) had successfully lobbied the state legislature for funding to build Eastern State Penitentiary, where this Pennsylvania System of treatment could be tried. Here mingling among prisoners was avoided, so much so that inmates were hooded when they went outside their cells. The Pennsylvania System as it was enacted had some opponents however, who believed this method of punishment caused mental illness among the prisoners. One such opponent, Charles Dickens, wrote: “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”

Eastern State Penitentiary was built in 1829 to architect John Haviland’s design. As it was originally built, the prison would hold 250 inmates. Haviland chose a radial layout, finding inspiration in criminologist Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 circular prism plan. He included many details that made Eastern State one of the more secure prisons of its time. It was the first to use a central rotunda as the prison’s “communications hub and nerve center” (Haviland 8). By the time the prison closed in 1970, ESP had expanded to provide for as many as 900 prisoners.

Finally, on October 23 1829, prisoner number one was admitted. Charles Williams was sentenced to two years with labor for the crime of burglary. Several infamous criminals would follow him to becoming inmates at ESP, including Al Capone, bank robber Willie Sutton, and Pep “the Cat-Murdering Dog.” Pep was allegedly sentenced to life in prison in August of 1924 by then-governor Gifford Pinchot. The dog, inmate number C2559, was in for murdering Pinchot’s wife’s cat.

After its closure in 1970, Eastern State Penitentiary sat largely as a ruin. However, in 1988 efforts to preserve the site began. The site was also used as a set for movies such as “12 Monkeys.” Since 1996, efforts to stabilize the site have been made to preserve the site as a ruin and to ensure it may continue to be open for public tours.

References:

Categories
Neighborhoods

Philadelphia’s Italian Market


 

In the late 1880s, 9th and Fitzwater was outside of the plan for Philadelphia. Not included in William Penn’s original outline for his city, the neighborhood sprang up quite by accident. Antonio Palumbo built his boarding house there, and received an influx of immigrants looking for work in the developing city. As the community grew they began to open up stores along 9th Street until it took on an appearance not dissimilar to what one finds in the same neighborhood today. Some of the many stores included butchers, cheese shops, cook ware stores, and the vast variety of goods one might find in a European outdoor market. There was nothing that the new immigrant could not purchase on 9th Street. Several shops survive to this day in a vibrant market that is the oldest and largest of its kind in the United States.

Even today, wandering between stands and storefronts, visitors feel transported. Despite the fact that William Penn did not include this area in within his planned city limits, it has been lovingly embraced by city residents and has become a major economic and tourist draw for the city. The Italian Market, and the residential area surrounding which borrows its name, is still a vibrant community with year round shopping. In the winter, fire barrels keep shoppers warm as they browse beneath awnings. Cannuli’s Meats and Isgro Pasticceria have both survived since the first decade of the 20th century. Shoppers may buy their food in the same store their parents, grandparents, and possibly great grandparents did.

Of course, the market has not remained static through the years. As immigration patterns and the neighborhood changed, so did the market. In the past 30 years the market has diversified well beyond its name and sells a variety of ethnic foods from Vietnamese to Mexican, as well as jewelry, souvenirs, and even Philadelphia’s famous cheesesteaks. Many Philadelphia restaurants even buy their ingredients straight from the market, to support local business and get the freshest ingredients possible. The cobblestones and carriages may be gone, but the market has not lost its rustic charm.

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